Wanton Angel Read online

  Linda Lael Miller

  WANTON ANGEL

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  SimonandSchuster

  This book is a work of historical fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents relating to nonhistorical figures are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1987 by Linda Lael Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN 978-1-4516-1114-4

  First Pocket Books printing July 1987

  10 9 8 7 6

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Illustration by Matthew Frey—Wood Ronsaville Harlin Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For Irene Goodman, my agent and my friend.

  Thank you for sharing this dream with me,

  and for helping to make it come true.

  Contents

  Part One Angel In Disgrace

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two Angel Of Vengeance

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Three Angel Ensnared

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part Four Angel Of Light

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Dear Readers, Old and New,

  It is with joy that I give you one of the novels written earlier in my career. Some of you have read it, and will feel as though you’re meeting old friends; to others, it will offer a completely new reading experience.

  Either way, this tale is a gift of my heart.

  The characters in this and all of my books are the kind of people I truly admire, and try to emulate. They are smart, funny, brave, and persistent. The women are strong, and while they love their men, they have goals of their own, and they are independent, sometimes to a fault. More than anything else, these stories are about people meeting challenges and discovering the hidden qualities and resources within themselves.

  We all have to do that.

  We are blessed—and cursed—to live in uncertain times.

  Let us go forward, bravely, with our dearest ideals firmly in mind. They’re all we have—and all we need.

  May you be blessed,

  Linda Lael Miller

  BOOKS BY LINDA LAEL MILLER

  Banner O’Brien

  Corbin’s Fancy

  Memory’s Embrace

  My Darling Melissa

  Angelfire

  Desire and Destiny

  Fletcher’s Woman

  Lauralee

  Moonfire

  Wanton Angel

  Willow

  Princess Annie

  The Legacy

  Taming Charlotte

  Yankee Wife

  Daniel’s Bride

  Lily and the Major

  Emma and the Outlaw

  Caroline and the Raider

  Pirates

  Knights

  My Outlaw

  The Vow

  Two Brothers

  Springwater

  Springwater Seasons series:

  Rachel

  Savannah

  Miranda

  Jessica

  A Springwater Christmas

  One Wish

  The Women of Primrose

  Creek series:

  Bridget

  Christy

  Skye

  Megan

  Courting Susannah

  Springwater Wedding

  My Lady Beloved (writing as Lael St. James)

  My Lady Wayward (writing as Lael St. James)

  High Country Bride

  Shotgun Bride

  Secondhand Bride

  The Last Chance Café

  Don’t Look Now

  Never Look Back

  One Last Look

  PROLOGUE

  Northridge, Washington Territory April 1886

  THE CHILD RAN, scrambling, wild dark hair tumbling over a tear-streaked face, past one tar-paper shack after another, captive sobs burning in her throat. Reaching the farthest shanty, the one closest to the raging green river, she stumbled over the shoe-scuffed wooden crate that served as a stoop and hurled herself into the tiny, dimly lit room beyond.

  “Gran!” she wept, in fury and in pain.

  The shanty had but one room, twelve feet square, and there was no window to let in the spring sunlight. Gran stood at the cookstove sandwiched in between a narrow bed and an even narrower cot, an iron-gray tendril escaping an otherwise severe hairstyle at the nape of her neck.

  The steam whistle in the smelter works up on the hill rose over the thunderous din to tell the time: twelve noon and too soon by three hours for Bonnie Fitzpatrick to be back from school.

  Gran was a gentle woman, but she brooked no nonsense and now her lips thinned. “What is it, child, that sends you runnin’ home before lessons is through, and lookin’ as though the Devil himself were right behind you?” The old woman paused to cross herself with the quick deftness of the very devout.

  Bonnie swallowed, suddenly ashamed. The Mackerson twins had triumphed, not by their torment, but by making her run away. Now she’d be in trouble right and proper, not only with her teacher, but with Gran and maybe Da, too, when he got home from his shift up at the smelter. And, on top of that, she’d have to go back and face those pampered hellions, the daughters of the smelter’s resident manager, with them knowing they’d bested her.

  “Well?” Gran demanded, not unkindly but not charitably, either. With a sigh, she left her wooden spoon in the soup kettle and sat down on the edge of the rickety bed she and Bonnie shared, patting the worn quilt with one work-roughened hand.

  Obediently Bonnie sat down beside her grandmother, full of remorse and anger. “The Mackerson twins called me a stupid Mick, Gran,” she confessed miserably. “They said I’m nothin’ and I’ll never live anyplace better than Patch Town.”

  Bonnie had half expected punishment, for outbursts of the sort she’d just indulged in were rarely tolerated, but instead she felt her grandmother’s strong, thin arm encircle her shoulders. “You know you’re a daughter of Erin, Bonnie, and that’s something to be proud of, then, isn’t it?”

  Bonnie had endured enough prejudice to shake that belief, if not rout it entirely. What good was being a daughter of Erin, if the one dress you had was so old that you couldn’t make out the pattern of the cloth anymore, or even the color? What good was it, if your shoes were pointy at the toes and too small for your feet in the bargain, so that you limped like a cripple?

  “Bonnie Fitzpatrick, you’ll be answering me, and straight away, too,” Gran prompted.

  “Maybe the Mackersons are right,” Bonnie reflected with a sigh.

  There was a charged silence in the room, and Bonnie’s stomach leaped in alert just before Gran wrenched her around to face her, one hand raised to administer a sound slap.

  But G
ran’s hand fell back to her lap, and her bright blue eyes twinkled with a mischievous humor entirely out of keeping with the lot that had fallen to the proud Fitzpatrick family. “It seems, then, colleen, that I’ve never told you about the day of your birth,” she said, and her brogue, faded by time and hardship to just a hint of the Irish, was suddenly thick and rich again.

  Bonnie’s smoky violet eyes widened in their dense, dark thicket of lashes and she pushed a tangle of mahogany hair from her face with a dirt-smudged hand. “Did something special happen that day?” she whispered, hoping against hope that something had.

  Gran nodded importantly and lowered her voice to tell the secret. “Indeed it did, then. The Lord Himself was there at your birth, Bonnie. He took you into his strong, carpenter’s hands, He did, and you just a wee baby, of course, fresh from Heaven. He smiled and held you up for the Father Himself to see, and His beautiful face was all alight with the joy of you, it was.” Here Gran paused to cross herself again, and she closed her eyes for a moment, her thin lips moving in a prayer that Bonnie couldn’t hear. “‘Look, then, Father,’ He says, says He, ‘isn’t she a fine babe, a wondrous fine babe?’”

  Bonnie could barely breathe. “Go on with you,” she whispered, her heart thudding against the inside of her chest with the splendor of such a vision.

  “’Tis true,” Gran insisted, crossing herself once more and then rising swiftly to go back to the stove and the pot of stew bubbling there, its fragrance pushing back the stench of Patch Town just a bit. After a while she added, over one sharp-bladed shoulder, “You go on back to school, then, Bonnie Fitzpatrick, and don’t be disappointing the Lord, Himself thinkin’ you turned out just the way He wanted and all.”

  Bonnie’s strong little legs trembled slightly as she stood up. She smoothed her dark tangled hair and squared her shoulders, peering at Gran’s rod-straight back in the half-darkness. “Is this one of your tales, Gran?”

  “Seen Him there with me own two eyes,” Gran said firmly. “Off with you, then, and mind you don’t dally along the way. I’ll not be overlookin’ any more foolishness and neither will the Lord.”

  Bonnie’s heart got away from her then, racing ahead in sheer jubilance, and she turned on one rundown heel to chase after it, dashing past the shanties, past the outhouses stinking in the sun, past the piles of refuse and the curious stares of the neighbors.

  From that day forward, Bonnie Fitzpatrick was changed. There was a deep and tender joy within her that could not be moved, for whenever she thought of the Lord holding her up in delight for the Father to see, it took the sting out of living in Patch Town and wearing the same ugly calico dress day after day. The Mackerson twins couldn’t hurt her and soon gave up trying, though Forbes Durrant, a boy who lived just two shanties from the Fitzpatricks, was more persistent. He laughed at Bonnie’s story and dubbed her “the Angel,” and the name stuck, first because Bonnie Fitzpatrick claimed the Lord Himself had been present at her birthing, later when she blossomed into a beauty the likes of which Northridge proper, let alone Patch Town, had never seen. Not for a moment was her fairness lost on Forbes, who teased her mercilessly but would have faced Goliath himself to protect her.

  At seventeen, Bonnie caught the eye of Eli McKutchen, heir to the McKutchen Smelter Works at Northridge and an empire that reached from one coast to the other as well. A tall man, naturally forceful in his opinions and broad in the shoulders, Eli had glossy, wheat-gold hair that was forever in a fetching state of disarray, along with his grandfather’s amber eyes. As far as Bonnie was concerned, he was near perfect, and therein lay the seeds of future grief.

  The townswomen were outraged, for it did seem that Eli McKutchen, with his glowing prospects and his good looks, was as enamored of Bonnie as she was of him. “Uppity snit. Has a fly in her nose, that one,” they muttered into their teacups and their delicately painted fans. How could Josiah, Eli’s grandfather and a man highly respected in Northridge, permit such an unsuitable alliance?

  The men of the town focused their jealousy on Eli instead of Bonnie. “Lucky bastard,” they grumbled, into their warm beer and their poker hands.

  Josiah, impressed by Bonnie’s spirit as well as her beauty, dashed the town’s best hopes for justice by approving wholeheartedly of the match. Bonnie’s humble beginnings did nothing to dissuade him; he’d been poor once himself, after all. He loved his grandson, and he saw in Miss Bonnie Fitzpatrick an indefinable something that made him feel quietly joyous. To celebrate Eli’s good fortune, for any good fortune of Eli’s was also his own, he built a two-story mercantile and handed it over to Jack Fitzpatrick, lock, stock and barrel.

  Fitzpatrick, hungry for half his life and in debt for the other, was overwhelmed that the giving up of a single, troublesome daughter could yield such bounty. After the ceremony, conducted in the McKutchens’ fragrant garden, Jack had a mite too much to drink and waxed sentimental, weeping because his dear old mother had died just the year before, too soon to share in the joy of it all, and of course his own sweet Margaret Anne had gone on to glory, too, long since. He’d rarely thought of his lost wife, once the first terrible grief had passed, but this fortuitous turn of events brought her back to his mind and his heart. What a delight it would have been had that sainted woman lived to see her girl wed to such a fine promising lad as Eli McKutchen, with all the world at her feet. And here was himself, with a store all his own—filled with goods it was—and his name painted right on the window for all heaven and earth to see! Why, the pleasure of it was enough to swell a kind heart to the breaking, and a broken heart was cause for a good man to slip into his cups a bit, now, wasn’t it?

  Indeed, when night had fallen and the wedding was over and the bride and groom were alone in their marriage chamber, there was only one person in all of Northridge drunker than Jack Fitzpatrick, and that was young Forbes Durrant, who knew a thing or two about heartbreak himself.

  Part One

  ANGEL

  IN DISGRACE

  CHAPTER 1

  “… a splendid little war …”

  SPOKANE AND THE surrounding wheat fields were far behind now; the train, with its burdened freight cars and near-empty passenger section, labored slowly, clamorously along the banks of the fierce Columbia River, making its way ever upward into the high country of eastern Washington State.

  Bonnie McKutchen sat with weary stiffness in her seat, a small, soot-covered bundle of quiet despair. Days of travel had left her dark hair lank and rumpled, and the smells of cigar and wood smoke clung to her clothes. Her blue broadcloth traveling suit and matching hip-length capelet, with its smart trim of jet beads, were both wrinkled, and her hat, despite repeated shakings, was rigid with dust.

  Beyond the grime-streaked window rolled the wild Columbia, and Bonnie turned her attention to the torrent. Rushing and tumbling from its headwaters high in the Cascade Mountains of Canada, slicing through Washington, the river formed the boundary between that state and Oregon for some three hundred miles, until it reached Astoria and the Pacific.

  Before the coming of the railroads, steamboat pilots had braved the treacherous river, with its stair-step rapids and vicious currents, but now, in early May of the year 1898, the great paddle wheelers, along with their captains, were mere memories. The primeval waterway, though tapped by its mighty tributaries, the Kootenay, the Willamette and the Snake among them, thundered on, still relatively unchanged by man, toward the sea that had summoned it for millennia.

  Bonnie sighed. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, often a guest at her table back in New York and, until his sudden resignation just a week before, Assistant Secretary of the United States Navy, had repeatedly and forcefully stated that the nation must take more care in protecting its rivers and conserving its wilderness lands. Such resources, Mr. Roosevelt maintained, while vast and bounteous, were not inexhaustible.

  Bonnie agreed, of course, yet as the train bore her relentlessly away from what meant most to her in all the world, the thought of Mr. Roosevelt sent a
dizzying jolt of resentment through her. But for his radical views concerning the current conflagration with Spain, after all, she might not be on this train and Eli might not be on his way to Cuba.

  According to the newspapers, the Spanish were inflicting unspeakable atrocities on the “childlike” natives of that hellish island of jungles and disease-bearing mosquitoes. Bonnie brought herself up short. She must not think of Cuba, or of Eli being there, until she was stronger.

  In order to distract herself, she surreptitiously inspected the few other souls riding in the railroad car. Sitting directly across the aisle was a lone man, hidden for the most part behind a crumpled and probably outdated copy of Mr. Hearst’s New York Journal. Toward the front, a family of four got up to stretch, colliding with one another as they moved into the narrow aisle.

  Bonnie studied the quartet from beneath lowered lashes.

  The man and boy, both fiery redheads, wore cheap ready-made suits of checks and plaids, designs that did battle upon the person of each and then proceeded to arouse hostilities with their counterparts on the opposite body. The woman’s hair was yellow, elaborately coiffed and quite possibly populated; her dress was a scanty tatter of pink taffeta.

  The daughter, whom Bonnie judged to be about twelve years of age, seemed oddly out of place in that busy vortex of tattersall and houndstooth and sickly taffeta. Uncommonly pretty, with shiny brown hair streaming down her back, green eyes, and flawless skin, she wore a simple brown dress, trimmed in braid of a cocoa color, and the garment, though frayed, was crisply clean. Momentarily, as her family tried to return as a bumbling unit to the soot-encrusted seats, the girl’s gaze met Bonnie’s in a sort of resigned desolation that was heartbreaking in a person so young.

  Saddened, Bonnie bit her lower lip and looked down at her hands.

  “They’re vaudevillians,” a masculine voice confided suddenly, in low and wholly charitable tones.

  Bonnie lifted her eyes as the man from across the aisle moved toward her. Tall and well-built, with bright chestnut hair and mustache, and royal blue eyes, he wore a gray suit with an embossed satin vest. His golden watch chain bounced against a middle that looked hard and fit. With neither ceremony nor permission, he sank into the seat beside Bonnie’s, giving the newspaper he had been reading an authoritative snap, and the pleasant scents of Castile soap and mint rose around him with the motion.